Happy New Protesting Year!

Jackie Chan is absolutely right that Hong Kong has become a “city of protest”, although he hasn’t shown the same enjoyment and enthusiasm for it as his fellow entrepôt-dwellers, preferring to go in for a more Mainstream Mainland-style crushing of dissent, including a quirky bureaucratic element of having “rules to determine what people can protest about and on what issues they can’t protest about”. [The traditional indigenous response to Mr. Chan can be observed here. I can attest this also works with other idiots, including me.]

But hold on, that most mainstream of Mainland websites, Sina Weibo — “the Chinese equivalent of Twitter” as glossophiliacs have it — has been allowing photos from today’s anti-Mainland demonstrations (see screenshot above, which at the time of writing could still be found on Weibo). Is Mr. Chan even more retrograde than previously envisaged? Maybe the Mainland authorities have finally seen the light and stopped censoring online discussion so assiduously… Let’s start this new Gregorian year on that quixotic note.